About 2 months ago I was chatting with some of the members of one of the QA Teams at work and they where telling me about their workflows for automating the testing of code and hosts added to the lab. One showed me some of the scripts they use and then it came to me

One will see in many places in Microsoft documentation and in several books out there that PowerShell has security system called Execution Policy, I personally do not agree this is a security measure but just a simple control to protect from accidental execution of code not specifically allowed thru normal means. First lets cover what

Â In the last blog post we covered the basics of importing Modules and PSSnapins to extend the shell, this provides us great flexibility in terms of expandability but at the same time depending on how we have configured our system this can pose functional and security risks. The main risk is a module overwriting

In PowerShell there are 2 main ways to extend the shell this are: * Modules – A package that contains Windows PowerShell commands int he form of functions, cmdlerts and worksflows, in addition it may contain variables, aliases and providers. Modules can be written in PowerShell and/or compiled as DLLs. * Snap-Ins – Are compiled

In the previous blog post I covered how to explorer WMI using a GUI tool, now lets look at how to explorer WMI first using the WMI Cmdlets that are found in PowerShell v2 and PowerShell v3, then we will look at how to use CIM Cmdlets that where introduced in PowerShell v3 and the

Now that we know that commands in PowerShell produce objects and that they have properties we can now start comparing, filtering and manipulating the objects. Operators For the manipulation of objects we will cover first the Operators in PowerShell since they are used against Objects and the Properties of objects. You will notice that the

For a while I have been posting several ways I use WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) in my day to day and in consulting but have never covered the basics. Talking with other people in the security field and in the system administration worlds they seem to see WMI as this voodoo black magic that only

By now you would have noticed if you have been reading my other posts where I use PowerShell that it is not your typical Shell and that it behaves in a unique way when it comes to the output generated by the commands we issue in it, this is because PowerShell is an Object based

Before we start running commands one of the fist things we have to do is to understand the rich help subsystem in PowerShell or as we say to many users in our IT life, RTFM. One of the first things to cover is that Help Subsystem in PowerShell v3 was improved so as to be

I do have to say last year I started to write about PowerShell Basics and I then stopped. The main reason was that after talking with Dave Kennedy I decided to write a class for DerbyCon 2012 and boy did I thought it was going to be simple. I started believing that I could write